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Ch. 23... The vanishing line between sanity, the nuthouse and the outhouse: The American Dream

Chapter 23

The
sensation of Life (as experience) is the relationship of everything less then
Infinite and that which is never necessarily Finite:Therefore the sensation of Life is the
relationship of everything necessitating (enabling) the Infinite as (to become)
unlimited Finitude.Thus Stunk Garlic

Rotten meats and bitter fruits can be for
some dishes the freshest and sweetest ingredients; how they get mixed into any one ragout does not define the character
of the meal in progress. Even the foulest of items can produce the most
delicious dish. I am is tasty ragout
continually simmering, through the grace of Garlic, on the stove, and even as “we speak here in this sentence” your lives
are being added to this here and now ragout. And as you continue reading
this story of ragout, whatever Garlic flavors get mixed into yoursimmering goulashes may only be here in the now for you to know… but the flavors are nowing nonetheless.

When I got to the hospital at 3 a.m., the
emergency room looked like a war zone. Leading up to my admittance, and
during my wait, there had been not only several shootings and car accidents,
shaking the whole place with drama, but, as I would later find out, two of my
fellow students from the public high school I was then attending had killed
themselves, and two others from a different H.S. had tried. And while this
suburban truth played itself out in the emergency room, I was kept bound in the
straitjacket and strapped to a gurney. It was only after my mother arrived that

I was, with her permission, set free… for the time being.

Nearly three hours passed before the staff
psychologist finally saw us—or I should say saw
me—and in the time my mother and I had sat there waiting, inundated in the
behind-the-scenes truth of suburban bliss, and before we entered the
legitimized realm of studied human behavior, the office of the chief magistrate
of non-Existence and nullified-Life, I hadn’t said one word to her. What could
I have said?

When we finally walked into the
psychologist’s sterile office and sat down, specks of light from a dawning day
drizzled in through the windows:It had
already become a long night. Wasting no time, the overworked doctor
immediately, with a pretense of concern, asked me why I would threaten to kill
myself. Like the rest of suburbia the doctor was slowly but freely giving up
his time, and so each moment he lost in expressing character and sentiment
relevant to Existence and Life buzzed with anticipation of something more
and/or less; his lugubriously rigid efforts at caring, in their efficient yet
stressed demeanor, seemed to make each ensuing moment my mother and I spent in
his respectably authoritative presence that much more important. What the
doctor didn’t know, as he sat there expressing a newly emerging paradox of a
non-virtuous, time-restrained concern for life, was that his characterless and
detached thereness was an anchor in
the process of being lowered. His
nonexistent Life was on course to becoming tasked and tethered to his divine
profession:It was the evolution of his professional self in the process of running alongside his evolving
Super Consumer Individual. Patients and their problems were, at the time of
this incident, in the early stages of being put onto the Frederick Winslow
Taylor conveyor belt of efficacious diagnosing or better said, “efficient
processing”, so that doctors tasked in such divine professions as psychology or
psychiatry could move onto the next patient as quickly as possible. Accommodatingly,
I explained in an “efficient” manner that this particular rumor of
“suicide” wasn’t true, and that my mother and I were just having our problems
at home. Without wasting words he inquired about my drug and alcohol
abuse. Again in an “efficient” manner, I jumped ahead on the Frank Gilbreth
conveyer belt of processing and, not answering his question directly, told him
about my grades, my full-time job, and my aspiring music career:I already knew that suicidal people are not into planned living or filled with hopes
and aspirations—I had plenty of plans and many aspirations. (Fortunately, my current
aspirations and hopes only consist of stinking of Garlic.) Immediately, in his
Gilbreth/Taylor efficient and stressed manner, following the less than the two
minutes time it took him to conduct his licensed and diplomed interview, the shrink looked at my mother and said:“I can see your son needs help. We’ll
keep him here.”

I looked at the doctor, politely said, “No
thanks”, stood up, and left. The door closed behind me, and as I imperturbably
neared the exit, CODE RED blared over
the intercom. I approached the doors to freedomas a security guard nonchalantly, and with a flair not much unlike
that expressed in my own unflappable gait, entered the hospital from the very same
doors; not completely head-on, but off to my left side. He pretended as though
he was going to casually stride by me, but at the moment we, in stride, stood
parallel to one another he reached for my arm. If Garlic has failed to
mention it, I took martial arts when I was a child; starting at age seven the
lessons went on until I was just shy of ten, so when the security guard
accosted me I automatically blocked his grab, hit him at the throat, and
slammed his head against the wall. I admit I wasn’t fighting Arnold
Schwarzenegger: The guy was a short,
fat, wannabe cop. But while I had him pinned against the wall five security
guards surrounded me; one of whom, with a less than collected voice, agitatedly
if not apprehensively stated: “We can either do this the easy way

or the hard way.”

I’m not stupid:No matter how pudgy and pathetic the wannabe
cops were, numbers did (and still do)
make a Difference. The straitjacket willingly came on and away I freely went to the nuthouse. If you
don’t already know, the cuckoo’s nest is the place and time where and when the real story is
always happening.

Upon arriving at the asylum I got a lucky
break: breakfast was just being served. I was, though, still bound in a
straitjacket as the sun rose over the Hinsdale Hospital Sanitarium. But before
they would release me so that I could get to my plate of yummy giblets, they made me promise I wouldn’t
hit anyone. I wasn’t entirely defeated, but hunger was burning a hole in
my stomach, and what else was a kid to do at this point besides acquiesce and
eat? Besides, one can never win a battle of wits on an empty stomach; so I let
my hunger dictate my immediate future, and I gave my word not to hit anyone
again.

These memories of my time in the nuthouse
swim in a cloudy existence as if they are bulbs of Garlic soaking in a brine of vinegar and herbs, waiting to be
plucked from the vat; with their eventual ingestion presenting themselves as
the release and, thus, deliverance of my
Identity into yet another mystical, emotional triumph in this savory, positive spirit we are ragouting… one in which you, lovely
reader, are a nowing flavor. There
was the nurse who was warm and friendly. There was the this is your new family introductions to the other
institutionalized nut jobs. One patient in particular I’ll never
forget. Her name was (and still is)
Donna and she had (and still has) an
audience of invisible, furry and friendly little creatures, which were (and still are), according to her, flying
above her, protecting her from anything and everything bad. She was (and still is) such a nice person that
she took (and is taking) the time to
introduce me, a nutty newbie, to her army of talking, flying, stuffedanimals.If I could recall their names, I would recite them here, but a
Tale of Ragout doesn’t always deliver details; trace flavors reveal only pleasant
mystery. But the waft of Garlic tells me that Donna was (and still is) kind enough to offer me the company of one of her
fuzzy, furry friends—an offer I didn’t and,
perhaps, can no longer take her up on:Existence and Life may be one and the same, but they/it are always
two Differences. Donna and her army
of flying, cuddly creatures exist, but they may or may not be with me or us in the necessarily here and now. In the now, at the
Hinsdale Hospital, it wasn’t that I ever doubted the Existence of Donna’s army
so much as it was I couldn’t see it…
and I still can’t. So what good would it have done or will it do me to accept her generous offer? I could have
hollered (and still can holler) “I
do believe in fairies. I do! I do!” and perhaps Tinkerbell would have
appeared (and still will appear)
before me, but what is the point:I was
afraid then of never getting out of Never
Never Land, and it certainly wouldn’t have done me any good to have my
own army of talking stuffed animals that I couldn’t even see. Maybe
now I could use Donna’s furry, flying
little friends, regardless of whether I can see them, because I would put them
to better use in the nuthouse called the outside world… but in 1985 I
wasn’t ready to command such invisible sprites, pucas, elves, fairies, pixies
or brownies to battle for me. The here
and now is always grounding in Difference—so, lovely reader, make no
illusions of time and space. We are, in garlic’s thrall, in deliverance and not in an illusion.

I have to laugh when I think about it:There I was, stuck in an insane asylum; in a country where the President
was already suffering from Alzheimer’s in his first term in office ― and then
got re-elected to a second
term!

“During an Oval Office
visit with her family, as Leslie Stahl was ending her time as a White House
correspondent, she wrote (in her memoir Reporting
Live, 1999, Simon & Schuster Inc.) at the end of President Reagan’s
first term in 1986:‘Rea-an didn’t seem
to know who I was. He gave me a distant look with those milky eyes and shook my
hand weakly. Oh, my, he’s gonzo, I thought. I have to go out on the lawn
tonight and tell my countrymen that the president of the United States is a
doddering space cadet.’”

Most Americans are in denial about this, but hey, Nero’s fiddle playing
is just an allegory for the trials and tribulations of every great
civilization. Humorously enough, everybody believes Ronald Reagan ended
the Cold War, but that’s a lie:He
merely solidified power in the hands of monsters and vampires; and then it was
these demons that battled with beasts elsewhere in the world. Eventually, the
Republican mantra of small government would become a clandestine but unified
Democrat/Republican, trickle-down chant of:

Big business should govern the world! Individualism
must become synonymous with willing slavery…feudalism and fascism has a new
sibling called Individual-Mass-Consumer Capitalism!Cheeseburgers for the subservient!

Everyone in the USA seems to forget that in
our nuclear arms race we, too, just like our then bitter enemy the Soviet
Union, were seconds away from being bankrupt (unless you count spending Social
Security funds as good financing), and that the backs of working-class people
carried the burdened of this so called “win”. The “win” undermined the unions
and slashed the average guy’s wages. (Do you remember the time when employers
paid holidays and benefits, and when pension weren‘t voided at the end of work
careers?) The working man shouldered the financial burden of the arms buildup
while corporate America was given the green light to hoard untold fortunes
(that they earned on the mad arms buildup and the backs of working people everywhere
in the world) and, if need be, commit atrocities to assist in obtaining these
fortunes. To this day, America’s fanatical turn towards unbridled,
irresponsible and decadent power can be traced back to the legacy of the Reagan
Administration. Sure there has always been corruption but Reagan
legislated it into the hands of the elite few, and in today’s United States,
corporations lead, through their financial influences over Congress and
Presidents, Americans into war without the approval of Congress. Corporations
now fire tens of thousands of employees and strip them of their lifelong earned
pensions, retirement benefits and healthcare packages: but somehow the CEOs
still keep their multi-million dollar perks and benefits regardless of whether
they commit felonies or run their companies and our economy as well as other
countries’ economies into the ground. This is to say that even when there’s
nothing left to trickle down, those on top are entitled to feast on the corpses
of those they’ve long since owned. We as consumers have even less value than
slaves. Good old George W., as an example of the Reagan legacy, even
passed a bankruptcy bill (at the request of credit card companies) that
excludes the rich and targets the middle and working-class people of America.
And now (as of this most recent rewrite), we have Obama face-track-selling out
working class Americans and world
citizens in the secretive TPP agreement. Thanks Ronnie Reagan for killing
the communist dream and middle and working class America all with
an army of talking, flying stuffed animals at your command—and the will of
American people, of course.

In those days I was still punk, but I was old school, and not how one would
understand old school in today’s
world. I used to have a pair of jeans on which I had sewn flowery material
into the legs to give them extraordinarily big bell bottoms. Bell bottoms and
flowers were, and I suppose still are associated with the Hippie movement, but
I was punk—even for the punks—because being punk meant always cutting the
edge. So as American Hardcore Punk, bare-boned, raw music violently tore
through small venues throughout the USA, I was even a sight for sore-eyes
within this expression itself. Instead of the skinhead and ripped, torn,
worn-out jeans and either an old T-shirt or hoodie, I still flamboyantly
flaunted the creative aspect of punk. Check out Negative Element in Facebook
and look at the cover photo from our 1982 release, Yes We Have No Bananas, and you’ll see me in my striped pants.
To this day the guitarist, Barry ribs me about those pants and my nonconformity
within the nonconformists. I never drank Generic Beer, maybe the next cheapest
beer on the shelf, but I never lost my appreciation for the expression of Life
itself. Punk has always been an aesthetic movement because it embraces
Difference as an origin. Even as a generic expression it still aspires to
creation as expressed in the relationship of living. (From Difference rising
into Identity and celebrated again in Difference’s origins.) Perhaps American
Hardcore Punk music is, in another sense, similar to the failed experiment of Communism here in Dresden and the rest of East
Germany. American Hardcore fought to strip itself of the valueless expressions
of consumerism, but in doing so it became an ally to consumerism’s eventual
takeover of any and all relationships of living.

I was always a spiritualist first, and, for me, the aesthetic of Life
celebrating in its own Identity (symbolic form, mental image, idea) of
deliverance (in Difference) is the vehicle to the experience, as creation and
inspiration. There are many spirits in any one given experience, and in
punk I loved the spirits of emotional intensity, energy, and
creativity. Unfortunately, most punk kids today only have the spirits of commodity and consumerism. Don’t get me
wrong, there are still positive aspects to the aesthetics of any expressions—especially
in the expressions of punk—but now they appear
negative. Step one foot into a trendy mall store, such as Hot Topic, and you
can feel the lack of energy and/or inspiration—unless you have enough money in
your pockets. (Nothingness-positive) Some
might call me avant-garde, and this is okay, but I was born in the
spirits of creation and inspiration as they first moved through the 1970s
fashion of punk. Nowadays, you have punk things as happenings (even the current
term punk’d reveals this underlying
meaning), and this is only going to get worse or, depending which side of the
coin you are looking at, better. Life can’t end in plastic wrap and UPC
tags. I don’t say this as a threat but as a warning to our beloved politicians
and business leaders. This is something not easily understood, because we live
with daily lies about Life:Lies mask
the very positive nature in All—the
Difference—of Existence. Identity, as it lives in symbolic forms, mental images
or ideas, as the ideas are of consciousness,
is not to be owned. Difference—the only knowable what-quality of any sense object or theoretical reference—as it
dances without time and space in the exchange of Infinite/Finitude is our beginning and end, and, as such, is NEVER a task or goal oriented1. But
Identity is the how in how we appear.
These symbolic forms as they are of consciousness must be recognized as the
only living aspect:We never know of the
narrator as a God or as self,
but/and/or because the context belongs to All
of Life, the wondrous Infinite/Finitude Difference; hence, Garlicis an origin of awareness that still
pays respect to both the Finite and Infinite nature of there is. Perhaps in Aristotle’s time, Garlic hadn’t yet revealed its face, but that’s only because
Aristotle had no need for such a relationship:There was no his or my world needing Garlic’s necessitating
authority in such matters as Life. There was only, thank the gods, there is:

“Where something is capable of making or moving a thing
without actually doing so, no motion results; for there can be no potency that
does not actualize.It is not a
sufficient principle of expla- nation, then, to postulate eternal essences
(ousia) as the advocates of Forms do, unless we postulate

them as includingan
‘initiating principle’ (archê) of
change. And even this qualification would not be enough, nor would it be enough
to postulate another kind of ‘essential nature’ (ousia) besides the Forms, for unless it were ‘actually functioning’
(energeein) there would be no motion.
But even for a thing to actually function is not enough if its essential nature
were but a potency; for as the potential may fail to exist, eternal motion
would not thereby be assured. There must, accordingly, be an initiating
principle of the kind we are seeking whose ‘essential nature’ (ousia) involves actuality (energeia).Furthermore, as such essential natures must
be eternal if anything is eternal, and accordingly are without admixture of the
‘material component’ (hylê), it
follows on this ground too that they are actuality.” (Wheelwright, Aristotle:The
Metaphysics, book XII. Lambada, The Eternal Unmoved Mover, vi., pgs. 97-98;Odyssey Press, 1951)

With our current delivery of and in deception, the Individual Identity, as a pure consumer, is
forcing the spirits of creation and inspiration to appear in actions or
otherwise face their (creation and inspiration as a spirit’s) own death in
consumption, as (could be said) lived
in consumer products:Symbolic forms,
ideas, or mental images, as they are Differences’ deliverance, are only
celebrated when they are destroyed through purchasing and consuming... as objects
adherent to nonexistence. However, Garlic says that to even turn the idea
(symbolic form) of creation into a kind of pre-packaged product is asking for
trouble and to turn explosive actions into a catalyst for financial and social
reward can only cause the actions themselves to escalate. Difference must now
appear through self-destructive Identity and/or, therefore, “the task” becomes
humanities tour of destruction... consciousness, as it is reality, is
completely broken. The relationships rooting Life to Existence in taking on the
form of not to relate or to self-destruct become, in their
non-relational valuing, the method for Identity to make its own appearance

real.

“Cogitare”
and “esse” remain, in their deepest roots, separated.As a person relinquishes control of the
mind/spirit, he or she is in Life split into two; he or she is left to the
discretion of a vampire-esque Power that drove a piercing dissonance into the
chant of spheres.”

People here in Dresden were horrified after
having read in the local papers about fifty drunken hooligans who called the
police after a soccer game had ended a
few hours earlier, from a phone booth near to where the soccer stadium is located, to report a brutal
assault in progress:The reported
assault in progress being the phone
call along with the eventual arrival of two policemen who the hooligans then,
in an orchestrated theater of the absurd, beat up; thus creating the crime of the reported assault in progress.... That was
punk. The hooligans could have just as easily grabbed the first persons to
have walked by, beat the crap of them, and then have called the police. But their actions were intelligent and
choreographed:It’s a hooligan’s job to
kick some ass, and it’s a policeman’s job to protect the citizens. The
hooligans fulfilled their characters… as did the police. The event transcended
every participants own transcendental states of awareness; thus, the event
actually lived and continues to live, in a greater and lesser sense, as art. Why was this creative and
inspirational? Well, life is an orchestration and we either hear the music
and know the awe in all of its appearances (regardless of whether the show is of a violent or peaceful nature) and give absolute thanks or we consume and we have no
experience:Zero-lived-realized-delivered
is no-Life.

Some time ago I read about spontaneous
happenings or what are now referred to as flash
mobs that have been occurring throughout New York City (and now, as of this
latest rewrite, everywhere in the world). In a flash mob people first text one
another an invitation to an impromptu gathering that is to be held at a
location like a subway station, inside a subway train itself, in a bus, at a
restaurant, in a bank lobby, in a mall, or inside a public building, and then,
after the invitees arrive at the prearranged time and place, they either
perform a pre-rehearsed skit, dance routine, smile and laugh at one another for
a few moments, or do whatever it is they agreed to do in the exchange of texts,
before quickly dispersing. In one happening, if I recall correctly, the
participants got on a bus at various stops and then at a prearranged moment
everyone clucked like chickens before their little spontaneous party came to an
abrupt end with everybody simply getting off at the same time. In more recent
developments, thanks to the documentation done by cellphone-camera-work and the
eventual upload of said documentations at Internet sites such as Youtube, we are
able to re-live such events. People can now be viewed performing their purely
simple and silly and/or highly complex, but still impromptu routines performed
in open, public places. As far as Garlic goes, all of these spontaneous
acts are punk. And by the very definition of being spontaneous these happenings
were and are, like American Hardcore Music, artless or without consumable
creation or inspiration:The acts and
their participants appear (as happenings) in self-negation: as consumable ideal and not as actual
objects with possibility of being bought and/or sold.

“All
art is concerned with coming into being, i.e. with contriving and considering
how something may come into being which is capable of either being or not
being, and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made; for art is
concerned neither with things that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor
with things that do so in accordance with nature (since these have their origin
in themselves).Making and acting being
different, art must be a matter of making, not of acting. And in a sense chance
and art are concerned with the same objects; as Agathon says, ‘art loves chance
and chance loves art’. Art, then, as has been said, is a state concerned with
making, involving a true course of

reasoning,
and lack of art on the contrary is a state

concerned
with making, involving a false course of

reasoning: both are concerned with variable.”

(Nichomachean
Ethics, Bk. VI: Ch.4)

The “false course of reasoning” in a flash
mob being that the art, which is a
word translated from the Greek word techne
and means that the “chance” or “opportunity” to come into Existence, is by
its design earmarked for death or nonexistence. The “action” and the “making”
reconcile through humanly finite
reasoning so that “making” produces no object except for an “action”. Flash mob
art is a suicide or kamikaze art form. Such flash mob art is
not about the object but rather the inspiration of the moment… like the Garlic you, lovely reader, can now
smell.

One last example of creation and inspiration,
an example you, dear reader, might
not consider valid, is the Columbine school shooting. Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold orchestrated an art-full
expression, the spirit of which will last for a long time:A spirit that made the Jane Fonda / Gene
Simmons do it yourself instructional home videos on how to kill and create
mayhem at your local high school or shopping mall. (Law enforcement never made the videos
public.)This alone expresses a strong sign, if not a logical
conclusion, that Eric and Dylan knew of the everlasting non-consumer effects their actions had and will continue to have,
and that there will continue to be a receptive audience for their art-fullwork for decades to come.

People have a hard time understanding this
last example because life and death have become too closely related to the
Individual’s Existence as it now so closely aligns with consumerism. Especially
in America, the spirit of the pseudo-religion called economics defines the
values of Life — or by the spirit of death as it has become the remote actor
animating the consumable or the function-pure. Punk as something
creative and inspirational can no longer make an appearance (Identity) as or through fashion, but only as a consumable product or as something
earmarked for death (as a product meets its Infinite-end in being consumed). But
inspiration is an original
phenomenon:It is directly linked
to awe
(thaumázein). Inspiration is an impetus
for Life to build upon Existence. And I may be stretching Noam Chomsky’s words
here: “we should not underestimatethecapacity of well-run propaganda systemstodrive peopletoirrational, murderous, andsuicidal behavior” (Noam
Chomsky, 9-11, Seven Stories Press, 2001), but I
would think he would agree with me in that “inspiration”, or in Chomsky’s word
“drive”, when set loose, whether as a
result of the guidance of a
“propaganda” or “marketing” system, is no longer something any “one” can control or direct… much to the
chagrin of our vampire and monster-led American politicians who believe they
alone own history, because they are,
or at least believe themselves to be, the only ones ― the guidance
counselors ― (capable of) tightly holding and thus controlling the reins of
such “inspiration”.

Thaumázein (awe) is, as far as it inspires, that
which Abraham, in absolute certainty, embraced when he did not question God’s
request he sacrifice his own son. So when Søren Kierkegaard writes in Fear and Trembling (1843), “So one
surely can talk about Abraham, for the great can never do harm when it is
apprehended in its greatness; it is like a two-edged sword which slays and
saves,” he never considered there would be, in a future history or alternate reality, a world in which God
AKA the Infinite/Finite inspired people to regularly commit such acts as randomly killing. For a suicide bomber
and/or suicidal school/mall shooter, the nullifying act of killing one’s-self ensures that the act
adheres, through negating the Finite/Individual aspect in every negating
possibility of the zero/one Life, to
faith in its godly Infinite dimension of the only knowable aspect (Difference) of Life living:Infinite/Finitude. The horrific and
unjustifiable act of killing, like Abraham believing to kill his own son would
demonstrate his faith in God, thus becomes justified in the felo-de-se in that the act transcends
the doer—the killer — in his or her
own self-limiting nature of a world filled only
with delusional selves AKA individuals AKA finite beings:A world incapable
of experiencing or of being required to experience the full Difference value of our Difference
Existence in Life. Faith is therefore surpassed, because the
true-value-potentiality of the belief that recognizes awe (thaumázein) is guaranteed
when the I kills, not so strangely en mass, the only thing God and his/her eternal, Infinite Life has
revealed in absolute certainty:Individuality... the I think therefore
I am. The killer is thus not like the others.
He is not like those that he or she kills. He or she is better. After a shooter commits suicide or a suicide bomber has
“bombed”, can anyone doubt that person’s integrity? It seems, to Garlicat least, that there are a lot of
people out there who believe in
Abraham and the religions of Abraham, so there’s obviously something to
sacrificing what one cherishes most…
Unfortunately in our world mandated by Narcissus it is the self we all love or are told to love most:Through the authority of politicians and
business leaders who are being led by vampires and monsters, craftily mediated created and manipulated desires are now tools for our guidance counselors to use in directing our purchases of the day.

This is to say that punk’s appearance is no longer expressed in the power of Living
(Identity) as manifest creativity and inspiration, but lives as a vehicle to consumer
product potential:Punk’s Life, as it is of inspiration, belongs to the vampires
and monsters as they lead our keepers in the corporate world. We now only value,
as individuals and regardless of our positions in Life, every creative
expression in its ability to live as a consumer object of money making
potentiality. Life has become nothing but a bi-product to consuming.

Imagine watching a nature documentary wherein
a peacock spreads its flamboyant, ornate plume in a dance of courtship. Now
imagine that same peacock having to first purchase its feathers from the mall
before it’s allowed be portrayed in the film. The greatest irony to this is
that even if we, the “peacock”, are inspired and creativity flows from our own
Individuality, we no longer want to dance
with a potential partner. We see our own potential in existence as the
possible placement on the mall-store shelf, where our potential as one, a maître d for creativity and
inspiration, is bought and sold. Our potential no longer lives as rhythm and
myth in the songs and dances themselves. We no longer belong or
even want to belong to ourselves (our-selves)
or to Life.

Punk’d has become a reality TV Show: Instead of pogoing in the glory of
life, we believe we have to own the dance of others before we ourselves can
dance. Creativity and inspiration are valued only when they provide monetary
wealth and/or an omnipotent kind of fame (how many likes has my video achieved?). We no longer create or
simply express the new feathers for the sake of the dance... for the sake
of Life as it is of Existence. In its
place, we exist, as an expression in form
or appearance revealed as ideas,
symbolic forms or mental images, for a someone
or a something else (as represented
in liked fame or hard currency or as
consumed items) with which we have no desire to dance:Appearance as it is Identity’s dance in
Difference no longer has a direct relationship to Existence. Whatever
belongs to Existence for deliverance of our Identity has become mediated by
consumerism (as it lives through annihilation of Difference. (Think of Zero or
a Nothingness reality) Every attempt to dance like the peacock is no longer done for the dance itself as it is rhythmic,
mythical expression celebrating Difference-origin. Nor is it done for the
potential partner (in the relationship or the exchange of Identity in
Difference) but for placement in a mall store or on the homepage of an online
retailer. In its most recent elevation, the dance is now done, as previously
mentioned regarding flash mobs, for YouTube likes…
and so ends the creativity and inspiration lived in a flash mob event. Ritual
and myth, as they are core to livingtime as a value or the sphere chanting
in Infinite and Finite,

have been imprisoned by monsters and vampires.

In Fear and Trembling (1843) Kierkegaard
describes the nature of the Knight of Infinite as: “Every movement of infinity comes about by passion, and no reflection
can bring a movement about.” Thus, in the Knights’s Finite thereness:
“He, the Knight, feels a blissful rapture in letting love” (love in Kierkegaard’s dialogue is fine
example of that which reveals “passion” in a pure form) “tingle through every
nerve, and yet his soul is as solemn as that of the man who has drained the
poisoned goblet and feels how the juice permeates every drop of blood–for this
instant is life and death.”And it is in this moment of awareness, as life and death, whereby awe (as Kierkegaard’s wisdom so wonderfully assumes the role
of the bugler paying taps) must fill or reflect one’s ownperceptual
quandary. The perceptual quandary (Identity sans Difference) becomes a default task. The default is thus an answer to one’s limited-in-nature perceptions in as far as it, the perceptual
quandary itself, is overcoming that which simply is-ing (or there is).
Kierkegaard further poetically
reveals, in our Zeitgeist of obliviousness, one’s
inability to recognize reflection in
its absolute sense of Difference. The
object of quandary becomes a
historical creation of one’s
functional, a priori act of
reflection.Like Kierkegaard, one revels in the futility of living in
a cage: the cage being The Individual.
Besides expression of form having become task oriented, and thus negating Life
in its entirety of Infinite/ Finitude Difference, the orchestration in the
expression of form, as it is Difference’s dance into Identity and Identity’s
return to Difference, is no longer captured
and caged by those who are
experiencing consciousness and life (in its anchoring nature as sheer Being), so that life may then be retold to others, so
that the others, too, can feel the
inspiration and creativity as it was lived and
is delivered by the experiencer of
consciousness AKA The Storyteller. But inspired and creative experience is,
instead, caged for the results
obtained from the “Like” icon on a video posting website. The past four hundred
years of blind, Difference-free searching for Identity has resulted in Identity
itself being rejected by Existence (or Consciousness). Life has been put at
odds with Existence in order that humanity
may succeed. The only option for inspiration and creativity to be expressed in
the full context of Difference and Identity is through actions that search to
transcend expression’s form (appearance as revealed in ideas, mental images,
symbolic forms):Because any and every
attempt at appearing, in our Kierkegaardian dystopia, is simply earmarked as a
consumable item. Somewhere deep down in a place long since hidden from
experience and/or understanding, we might want to win the mate in the dance,
but the actual display is owned by monsters and vampires, and we are
thus driven to do things… things
which have no presence in our own
Existence. The actions of the Columbine shooters as well as many other
children and adults participating in such happenings
can only win:Their actions are given to
and in the moment. Their actions are not driven by an Individual consumer
Identity, and this is proven in that their suicides solidify the deal. To go on
a random killing spree and then commit suicide reveals that the person has
little regard for his or her own
Life, but cherishes Existence… just like Abraham. Such said happenings
(school/mall shootings and such) are thus, as
and in Existence, appearance of
Difference sans Identity. This is why these actions are abhorrent:Life is forced into its primal essence.
Origin as it is Difference first rising in consciousness tries to shed an
Identity that is, as it is,
attempting to annihilate itself (an Identity that is in its default
complementarity nature Difference) so it can reestablish a proper order ofthings… things which can only have the delivery
of awe as their purpose. Such an
original conflict is one of the primal essences of war itself:This is what Mr. Vonnegut was commenting
on. There is no Individual reward of Identity in the sacrifices made in a
war, but only a spirit which
continues to live on. What Eric and Dylan understood is that Life as it is
appearing can never be negative. There is therefore no difference between their
actions and that of Palestinian, Iraqi, or Afghan suicide bomber’s actions.
Unfortunately, we don’t like to look at the political nature of these extreme
oppositions to our consumable Identities, because to do so would put us in a
position that no longer recognizes material, Individual, mass consumerism as an
origin:We would no longer have an Individual Identity as a true, spiritual
source or transcendent impetus:One would have to recognize Difference
as the true source for all that is spiritual and/or meta. We are, in our historical perspective that Dr. Delgado, the guidance counselor, wanted to take
charge of, was already convinced that to do so—to recognize the political
nature of such violent acts—would lead us, our Identities, into the abyss. If
the mass consumer products of our historical humanity no longer embody our
spiritual-potential and transcendental probable and possible lives, where would
or could we end up besides at the bottom of Nothingness? This is to say
that vampires and monsters compel us to cling to our precious Individuality through use of fear. Ironically, we freely
give ourselves into this bondage to Nothingness out of fear of a Nothingness
that doesn’t even exist. In tragic
irony, Existence itself is the sacrificial lamb for this Faustian pack that
Clergy, Church, Temple, Science, Scientists, Politicians and Corporations
embrace and embody. Nothingness
is requisite for our possibility and probability to live in their world. Regardless of whether we
know about the Faustian pack, we willingly give up our lives. We give up the
only thing that one might ever truly possess:Time.2

Is this the preferred (non-historical) dialogue? Not for me, and obviously it doesn’t mean
that I have stopped experiencing or that I’m not here in spirit (Eau de Garlic), trying to convey this to
you, dear reader, so that we all may
take another direction. I wish such happenings
on no one:﻿neither the victims nor those doing the shooting. The comical
characteristic to the tragedy of our consumer
truth is that the Mr. Obamas, Mr. Bushes, Mr. and Mrs. Clintons, and their ilk
act as if they’re doing Existence a favor by bringing market/consumer Identity
to the world, but it is people like them who deliver the suicide bombers and
Dylan Klebolds and Eric Harrises into Existence. Our leaders and their
corporate and monetary friends are the responsible parties, because they
believe they own the monsters and vampires, and thus they feel justified in
deciding how Life is mediated… there is
no need to apply any electrodes. But we know fromGarlic’s glorious aroma that for any virtuous politician the only
reward is in his or her responsibility to their positions as leaders and not to
their own Individual greed. This latter so-called virtue of consumer market
economies delivers only death:When the
consumer objects (or object-lifestyles) have become the only rewards of Life,
Existence is sacrificed. Thus, death,
as a way of conquering the Nothingness or Zero given in the equation, is the
resolution to this paradox. (It is no
coincidence Aristotle considers pleonexia
or greed- aggrandizement-graspingness-avariciousness as the root of all evil. Nicomachean Ethics, Wheelright 1951) Erik
and Dan are still here in Life and Existence, otherwise their names would mean…
nothing. We could only hear or say blip and blip caused tragedy blip… so
every killer’sname would simply become an indistinguishable “blip”.

Garlic may flow in opposition to the Individual,
and it may be suspect of the virtues in evolution, technology and consumer
economics, but it is not about death. In a Garlic Revolution, vampires and monster have no chance of winningin living, and although the Obamas, the
Bushes, the Clintons and their kind purvey absolute negativity, the I am should probably be giving them more
credit because they also fuel my Existence, The Origins of ﻿Garlic Cures and the Art of Telling a Tale of
Ragout. But then again, without
them Life would be so

much more positive.

As for the origins of Garlic Cures, James B. and his wise ways
helped me, and continue to help me. I might get lost in Life, but I know
how to protect myself. Jim could have easily crumbled, because his enemy was as
deceptive and illusive as all of ours, but he could hear the spirits of Garlic
speaking and they guided him. Maybe we could all fare better with a little
more Garlic in our pastas.